Abingdon News No. 57

4 April 2021 Abingdon News Senior Maths Challenge Over 80% of the students taking the Senior Maths Challenge achieved a certificate at the Bronze level or above, including 15 gaining the hallowed Gold certificate – placing them amongst the top 10% across the country. Ashwin Tennant and Max Williams were outstanding. Ashwin missed out on a perfect score by a single question, whilst Max achieved an astounding perfect score. 11 students qualified for Senior Kangaroo, placing them in the top 6000 scorers across the UK. It was great to see Scott Yap and William Meng achieve a Merit for their superb performance in this follow-on round. British Mathematical Olympiad In other news from the Maths department, congratulations to Winston Li, Ashwin Tennant, Max Williams and Jeroan Yip who qualified for the first round of the British Mathematical Olympiad. Ritangle success Several teams of sixth form mathematicians took part in the Ritangle competition, attempting to solve all 25 problems to arrive at one final answer. Ritangle is a free maths competition aimed at teams of 16-18 year old students running over approximately 10 weeks in the autumn. Around 900 teams competed and Abingdon was one of only 37 schools who had teams achieving ‘unlock stage 3’. The History department was privileged to welcome eminent British historian and political scientist Professor Rana Mitter, to give an online lecture on China from 1919 to the present day. Rana Mitter is Professor of History and Politics of Modern China at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford. He appears on numerous BBC documentaries, including In Our Time, and we were very lucky to hear him speak. We had more than 60 attendees from the Sixth Form, including pupils from some of our partner schools in the area. From Conflict to Confucius During the presentation, Dr Ashbee talked about how the English Heritage organisation would often use the term ‘Dark Ages’ to describe the time period of buildings and artefacts they own or manage. The pupils discussed alternative terms such as Early Middle Ages, Post- Roman and Pre-Conquest. One novel suggestion was ‘The Age of Invasion’. Boarders enjoyed their first weekend back at school spending time baking and gardening. Offline Friday Third year Crescent students made the most of their “no screen” time on 29 January, with activities ranging from model building to gardening, and from reading to pizza making! The Age of Invasion The first years were privileged to hear Dr Jeremy Ashbee, from English Heritage, give a presentation on its use of the term ‘Dark Ages’. This was as a follow up to their polite letters of complaint to the English Heritage team on their misuse of the term.